


Lost and Found - James' Story

by PR Zed (przed)



Series: Lost and Found (MCU) [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Captain America: The First Avengers Divergent, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 16:44:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11212098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/pseuds/PR%20Zed
Summary: He allows himself be overwhelmed by panic and grief for a minute, lets himself to stand there, overwhelmed, like a civilian.  But he's not a civilian, no more than Peggy is, and even with his oldest living friend nearly beaten to death, he has responsibilities.He uses his ID to commandeer a private office with a phone, and then he begins to make phone calls."Nick.  It's James.  There's been an incident at Peggy's house…"In the wake of Peggy's death, James finds a reason to keep on living.





	Lost and Found - James' Story

## 1975

James's eyes feel like someone's thrown grit into them. He's sore and tired and really wants to sleep in his own bed tonight, but his meetings at the State Department go late into the evening and by the time they let him loose every last plane to New York City has already left. So he goes back to his hotel, tells the desk to give him a wakeup call at too Goddamned early in the morning, and then tries to get a few hours' sleep. It's one of God's little jokes that he spends the precious few hours of night he has left staring at the ceiling of his hotel room.

He really wishes Peggy would stop sending him to Washington.

He knows why she does it. She still has some hope that he'll show an interest in leading SHIELD. That he'll take over the next generation of leadership when she's ready to step down. But there's absolutely no chance he'll ever take on _that_ responsibility. He's fine leading small teams. Enjoys it even. He likes making a plan and implementing it and making sure all of his people come home. But he's a tactical thinker and he knows it. Leading an organization like SHIELD takes a talent for strategy. Long term strategy. And he just doesn't have that. He's far happier following someone who does. Someone who doesn't mind attending meetings in Washington. Someone like Peggy.

"I'm not going to be here forever," she told him the last time this came up. "I want to make sure SHIELD is in the hands of someone I trust when I retire. And I trust you more than anyone."

"I'm older than you are, Peggy. You should be looking for young blood."

"You are young blood, dear boy." She'd run her hand over his face, looking closely at him. He'd known what she saw. A face far younger than his years. It scares him, sometimes, watching all his friends, his family, get older while he seems to stay the same age. Or as close as never mind. Becca's kids were almost getting so they looked older than he did. He frequently wondered if George was ever going to ask why Uncle James looked so damn young.

At least Peggy has Fury to work on now. Nick has a talent for strategy and he enjoys poking around in SHIELD's archives as much as James likes building stuff in the labs. He'll make a good leader for SHIELD someday. And if Nick is no fonder of meetings than he is, he's better at cutting through the bullshit during them.

James is up and dressed and ready to go before his wake up call. He makes it to the airport, onto the plane and back to New York entirely on autopilot. As he walks through the door of his apartment, he's calculating how long he can sleep in his own bed and still make it into the office on time when he notices the light blinking on his answering machine.

It's probably nothing, probably a wrong number or someone trying to sell him something he doesn't need, but he hits the play button anyway.

"James, it's Peggy. Could you call me back when you get this? It's urgent. I've got a file you need to see."

He's so tired, but it's Peggy, and she sounds worried, so he calls her back, letting her phone ring until it goes to her answering machine. He leaves a message, then calls her office and leaves a message there to.

That should be it. She's probably on her way into the office. He can catch up with her when he makes it to headquarters. But she'd sounded worried, and Peggy never sounds worried.

He kicks his overnight bag into his bedroom, and then hails a cab. Brooklyn to the East Village doesn't take too long at this time of day, with rush hour at least an hour away. He tips the cabbie and bounds up the steps to the door two at a time. And that's where he finds the first wrong thing: the door is unlocked and open a crack.

James spent nearly six months living in Peggy's spare room ten years ago, and one of the things that time taught him was that she is very careful. Meticulous about everything, including her own security. She checked that the doors were locked tight every evening, and did a perimeter check every morning. There is no way Peggy Carter's door could have been left open accidentally.

He switches into operational mode immediately, quietly pushing the door open as he pulls his spare revolver from the shoulder holster he almost always wears. (SHIELD agents are never off duty. The ones who don't remember that are the ones who end up dead.) He clears each room in Peggy's house the way he'd clear any target location on a mission. Nothing looks out of place until he comes to the study. It looks like papers on her desk have been shoved hastily out of the way, half of them ending up on the floor. And when he moves further into the room, he can see that the safe is open, its contents strewn in front of it.

His concern ratchets up to full blown panic.

He wants to yell for Peggy, but he doesn't. If there's a bad guy in the house, he doesn't want to alert them. Instead, he heads up the stairs, keeping his tread soft and even, his weapon held in front of him. He clears the spare bedroom, the bathroom, then moves towards Peggy's bedroom. What he sees inside has him break SOP. There's so much blood, he freezes. Then he notices Peggy's chest rise, and he doesn't know if he's more relieved or horrified that she's still alive. 

He forces himself to move, to call for help, to stay with Peggy until the ambulance arrives, to calm the ambulance driver down so they can get Peggy to the hospital. (Apparently, working the streets of New York didn't prepare the poor bastard for this moment. Not that James blames him. He's been on some of the worst of the battlefields of Europe, and the shape Peggy's in is still one of the worst things he's ever seen.)

James rides in the ambulance with Peggy. He's not sure if she knows he's there, but he's not going to let her take this ride without a friend. Once in the hospital, she's met by a flurry of doctors and nurses, and James lets himself be pushed aside, watches as Peggy's gurney is rushed down the corridor, disappearing behind the doors of an operating room.

He allows himself be overwhelmed by panic and grief for a minute, lets himself to stand there, overwhelmed, like a civilian. But he's not a civilian, no more than Peggy is, and even with his oldest living friend nearly beaten to death, he has responsibilities.

He uses his ID to commandeer a private office with a phone, and then he begins to make phone calls.

"Nick. It's James. There's been an incident at Peggy's house…"

It seems like it's only minutes later that Nick is at his side. Howard arrives not long after that.

He manages to stammer out to them both what's happened, all the while pacing the corridor and keeping an eye on the door Peggy had disappeared through. Several white-clad nurses enter those doors as he watches, but no one emerges to tell them what's going on.

James isn't sure if it's one hour or three later that Howard finally forces him to sit down in the one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs lining the corridor, and Nick shoves a cup of watery coffee and a limp sandwich into his hands. It's been thirty years since the war's been over, but soldiers' instincts still take over: rest when you can; eat when you can.

There are no windows visible where they are, but James figures it must be late afternoon when a man finally leaves the operating room and heads in their direction. James observes the man with an agent's eye. He's dressed in white scrubs that are liberally spattered in now-dried blood. He's older, and from the way he carries himself, James guesses he's the surgeon in charge. His expression is…not good. He's put on a mask of professionalism that James suspects he uses to deliver bad news, so James knows what's coming. He knows what's coming, but it still feels like he's been run through with a sword when the surgeon tells them that he's very sorry but Miss Carter didn't make it, her injuries were too grievous and there was nothing they could do.

"Director Carter," James corrects him automatically, even as he feels like he's entered a space out of time. His lungs feel paralyzed in his chest but his heart is beating far too fast. He knows he's clenching the fingers of his metal hand over and over again, but he can't seem to stop it. Beside him, Nick rises to talk with the doctor, but James can't understand what they're saying, as if they've suddenly switched to an alien dialect he doesn't know. Howard places a hand tentatively on James' good shoulder, but James can barely feel it. He's frozen. Nothing can touch the ice inside him. Nothing can warm him.

He grinds his jaw, clutches metal arm with flesh hand, and manages to stand. He nods in the right places when Nick and Howard talk to him. 

The only thing he doesn't do is go into the operating room to 'say goodbye.' He saw enough in Peggy's house, in the ambulance. He has enough images of the wreckage of Peggy's body to fuel a decade's nightmares. Nick enters the room with the doctor beside him. When he emerges, minutes later, the grim look on his face tells James he's made the right decision.

When there's nothing left to be done at the hospital, he lets Howard maneuver him out the door and into his car. He dimly registers that Jarvis is driving, but all of his attention is focused inward, on keeping his body moving, on not letting the ice inside immobilize him.

He's surprised when the car stops outside of Howard's mansion.

"You don't have to-" he tries to say. "I can go home." But the words catch in his throat, come out half formed.

"I'm not letting you stay in Brooklyn on your own," Howard says.

"I can go to Becca's." The words are quiet, but he manages them.

"You can't." Howard's voice is insistent. "You can't take this to her. She won't understand."

Howard's right. Becca won't understand this kind of loss, the violence of it. She can't; it's not part of her world. The closest she's got to it was losing friends to the war, Steve chief among them, but even then, she didn't see the blood and guts of it. She didn't see James right after Steve died. Peggy was the one who stayed with him then. Peggy saw the worst of him, and brought out the best.

He looks up at Howard and it finally registers that he's not the only one who's lost a friend. Howard's eyes are glassy with unshed tears, his mouth quivering with suppressed emotion. Howard's known Peggy even longer than he has. The three of them have worked together for decades, have been friends for all that time. Howard told Peggy when he'd proposed to Maria before he told anyone else, even James.

Howard is the only one who can understand this loss.

"All right." James nods and then he's climbing the steps, Howard at his side, holding his elbow. James isn't sure who's being supported more by that touch.

Maria opens the door before they even reach it, and she's hugging Howard tight, even while she reaches out a hand to James. Maria draws them both inside, closes the door firmly behind them. It's her tears that finally crack the ice inside of James, the ice that was his last strength. As he feels the weakness in his legs, he registers a small dark shadow darting from the dark-panelled drawing room, only to be held back by Jarvis. 

He's never quite sure how he makes it up to the spare bedroom he's long-since claimed as his own here, but he finds himself sitting on the brocade bedspread with Howard beside him, rubbing his back as Maria stands in the doorway.

"You can go, Howard." James forces himself to speak. Howard looks torn between his wife and his friend. "I'll be all right."

"Will you?" Howard asks.

"No," James chokes out. "Will you?"

"No." Howard sounds as hollow as James feels.

"Go." James pushes his friend. "Let Maria look after you."

Howard goes, closing the door behind him with a soft snick, and James lies down on the too-soft bed, curling around a pillow.

The tears don't come immediately. The ice may be gone, cracked into shards that pierce, but he's still hanging onto the last remnants of control. He forces himself to surrender, like prying a chokehold off his throat in a fight, finger by finger. He shudders, hot tears stinging his eyes and breaking up the last of the ice jam, and finally lets the wave of grief sweep him away.

* * *

James wakes with his eyes sticky and his head pounding. There's a brief, blissful moment where his only concern is the headache, with wondering what the fuck Howard gave him to drink the night before that his hangover is this bad. But then memory breaks over him like a tidal wave and he shudders into the pillow.

There's a shush of fabric, a quiet gasp, and James' eyes fly open, his training taking over, ready to identify and neutralize any threat. A pair of big eyes topped by unruly dark hair peer over the edge of the bed at him. Tony. 

James forces himself to sit up, to wipe his eyes and to not cry. James imagines Tony's seen quite enough crying in the last twelve hours.

"You look awful, Uncle James," Tony says. James feels a bark of laughter explode from his throat, because, Jesus, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. If possible, Tony's even more blunt than his father. He's certainly sharper than any of his nephews were at this age. George and his brothers hadn't gotten much beyond swings and mud pies at this age. Tony's already designing working steam engines in Meccano.

"That's good, kiddo, because I feel like shit."

Tony's eyes widen at the profanity, but he doesn't say anything. Tony's growing up surrounded by wealth and privilege, and James has always viewed his position in Tony's life as the scandalous fake uncle who gives him a glimpse of what lies beyond that privilege, the guy who lets him do things his parents, or at least his mother, would never approve of. (Not that Maria disapproves of James. Except for the times when he and Howard vanish into Howard's labs for a few days at a time, anyway. "Better the lab than the bars," Maria will always say when they finally re-appear at the mansion, sleep-deprived and starving. James never tells her just how much alcohol Howard puts away when he's working in the labs.) 

"Mom and Jarvis told me. About Aunt Peggy." He crawls up on the bed and sits beside James. "Is she really dead?"

And just like that, the brief lift seeing Tony has given him is gone.

He crosses his legs and hugs a pillow and nods.

"Yeah."

"Mom's so sad. I think Dad is, too."

"We're all sad, kiddo. Peggy was our friend."

"She was my friend, too." Tony sits up straighter. "She'd tell me stories."

"Fairy tales?"

"No," Tony huffs impatiently, as if fairy tales were kids' stuff and far beneath him. "About the war. About Captain America and the Howling Commandos." Apparently he wasn't the only one giving Tony a glimpse of the world beyond Manhattan mansions and private schools. "You were there, too, right? In the war?"

"You bet. Captain America was my best friend. I was the first one he asked to join the Howlies."

"Could you tell me a story? One with Aunt Peggy? She didn't tell me many that she was in."

James frowns. There aren't many stories from the war he can tell to a kid, even a precocious one like Tony. He can't tell him about what it's like to take to the high ground and wait in a sniper's nest until you get a kill shot. He can't tell him what it's like when the man next to you takes a bullet in the stomach, or steps on a mine. He won't tell him what it feels like to lose your best friend.

But then he remembers a command post in Italy, and Dugan betting Peggy that she couldn't pilfer one of Phillips' precious bottles of scotch. Peggy had managed to liberate a whole case of the stuff and pin the blame firmly on Dum Dum. That story starts him off.

By the time Howard and Maria knock on the door, James has finished with the scotch story, embellished on Steve's story of Peggy knocking down a lunkhead in basic training, and started in on how she'd torn into him and Howard when one of their new arm designs had nearly electrocuted him.

James watches Howard and Maria as he's finishing the Electric Death Arm story. Howard's smiling fondly, and Maria looks faintly horrified. Tony is utterly fascinated.

"Is that the arm?" he asks.

"Nah." He pokes Tony in the chest with his left arm. "This one's practically brand new. Your dad and I finished it last month."

"Can I help with the next one? You're going to make a next one, right?"

"Of course, you can," James says, just as Maria blurts out "Absolutely _not_ , Anthony Edward Stark!"

"Mom!" Tony whines.

Howard laughs.

"You're not helping," Maria says to her husband. "And you, young man, shouldn't be annoying our guest. Not right now."

"It's okay," James says. "Tony was asking me about Peggy. And talking about her…it helped." 

He's not just making an excuse for Tony, he realizes. It really has helped, telling stories about Peggy. It always helps. In the aftermath of Steve's death, he'd told Peggy stories about the two of them in Brooklyn. And when their parents had died a couple of years ago, his dad six months after his mom, he and Becca had shared stories about their family every time they got together. It doesn't lessen the loss, but it does make the loss more bearable: remembering the good times; remembering the bad times survived.

And it helps to have Tony around, to have someone who's been on the planet so little time, who has needs that are immediate, who doesn't have time for the adults around him to get lost in their own grief.

There'll be time enough for grief. And for finding out exactly how Peggy ended up in harm's way in her own house. But for now, James is quite happy to drag a washcloth over his face and go down to breakfast with the Starks, Jarvis presiding over them all like the very proper guardian angel he is.

* * *

It takes James two days to go back to SHIELD. He spends the first day at Howard's, letting Maria and Jarvis look after them both, and helping Tony build a replica of the Coney Island Wonder Wheel out of Meccano. ("Steve woulda loved this," he tells the boy, and Tony just beams.)

The second day, he goes back to Brooklyn, to his apartment. He calls Becca, tells her about Peggy and cries a bit more on the phone. He takes a shower and naps in the middle of the day, then goes to bed early. Sleep is important. After Steve died, Bucky slept so Goddamn much.

On the third day, he wakes up, and he feels…not good. But functional. Like he can face people without shattering. Like he can work. He showers and shaves and gets dressed, then catches the train into Manhattan.

As soon as he enters the SHIELD offices, he wonders if he's come back too early. The offices are quiet as a forest after battle. Conversations are carried on in whispers, and whenever anyone sees him he can see the panic in their eyes, like they don't know what to say to him. That's okay. He doesn't know what to say to them, either.

The one person who doesn't panic is Nick. He's in his office, the one right down from Peggy's, the desk piled so high with files that James can only see the top of Nick's head.

"What the hell, Nick?" James says as he enters the room. He's not sure what he expected Nick to be doing (running ops? planning security for Peggy's funeral?) but it wasn't paging through what looked like thousands of yellowed, dusty pages from the archives.

Nick glares at him, and then glances behind him, as if checking if there's anyone with him.

"Close the door," Nick says.

James pushes the door shut with a click, even while his skin starts to prickle like it does every time he attends an operation briefing.

"What's going on?" 

"Did Peggy talk to you at all? The day before she died?"

"No. I was in Washington. I got back that morning"

"She didn't say anything to you when you found her?"

"Christ, no. You saw her, Nick. What could she have said?" James doesn't want to think about it, but he sees the wreck of Peggy's body lying on the floor of her bedroom again.

"Why were you at her house?"

"She'd left me a message. Said she had something she wanted me to see. Which was probably whatever got her killed. But she didn't tell me what it was, if that's what you're getting at."

"I think I know what it was," Nick says, his face creased with a scowl.

"What? Then why the fuck haven't you said anything?" James feels a flare of anger at the thought of Nick sitting on information that could catch Peggy's killer. He suddenly wants nothing more than to be aimed at a target, just like he was during the war, a weapon to be used for the greater good.

"Sit down, James." Nick Fury may be nearly thirty years his junior, but he has the voice of command. James bristles, but he sits down. And then Nick tells him about going to Peggy with a file from a long forgotten Russian asset.

"I gave her that file, and less than 24 hours later she was dead, and the file was removed from her house. What does that tell you?"

"That someone didn't want that file found."

"Not only that." Nick stares at him with his one good eye and James feels himself measured and judged. "The someone who didn't want that file found must have been inside SHIELD. Or else how would they have even known it had been found?"

"Jesus," James whispered, feeling like an idiot, like a rank amateur. 

"We've got a mole inside SHIELD," Nick says, his voice hard as steel.

"What the hell was in that file, Nick?"

"I don't know, exactly. It was in Russian, and I don't speak Russian. But there was one word I recognized in it, and that's why I took it to Peggy."

"What was the word?"

"Valkyrie."

Of all the things Nick could have said, that's the one word James is not expecting. He hears that word, and suddenly he's back in a hospital bed in London, with his arm freshly amputated and Peggy telling him that Steve's ditched Schmidt's plane. That Steve's dead. Now Peggy's dead, too, and it's come back to that fucking plane and fucking Hydra and fucking Schmidt, damn that skull-faced freak to whatever hell he ended up in.

James realizes he's doubled over, his arms curled around his body, his eyes tightly shut in a failed attempt to keep the tears from leaking out of them. He'd thought he'd cried himself out at Howard's house. He'd thought wrong. Peggy's loss is fresh, and Steve's loss will always be a scabbed over wound. To confront them both at once is more than he can bear at the moment.

"I'm sorry, James." Nick's voice is flinty, but sympathetic. "I'd keep you out of this, if I could. But right now, you're the only one in SHIELD I can trust."

James nearly laughs, but he doesn't have it in him. Instead, he bites his lip, hard, hoping that the pain will help him focus. It works. Mostly. He unfolds himself, sits up straight and forces himself to look directly at Nick.

"What do you need, Nick?"

"I need someone who reads Russian."

"I'm your man." Over the years, James has done graduate courses in engineering, and he needed a foreign language if he was ever going to get a Ph.D. It's been years, and he's still never decided if he's going to sit down and write a thesis and get the damn degree, but it's been helpful, being able to read Russian journals.

"I've pulled all the files from the same part of the archive as the file I gave Peggy." Nick pointed to the stacks of files surrounding him. "I want to go through them all, look for anything else on the Valkyrie." 

"All right," James says. "Let's get going."

They methodically go through all the files, with James skimming every page, and Nick noting anything of interest. They're through the better part of a stack before they find a reference to the Valkyrie, but it's disappointing, only a note about the plane being salvaged and nothing at all about the man who'd gone down in it. He tamps down his disappointment and moves on.

In the next stack, James starts to notice off-hand references to medical experiments, to a serum. It may be nothing. The Soviets were probably working on their own serum. God knows SHIELD has tried to reproduce the formula that made Steve more than once. But a few files down in the stack, there's a reference to the "Valkyrie sample." James starts shaking, thinking about Steve's body being nothing more to the Russians than a sample, tissue to be experimented on. He wonders if they ever gave him a proper burial, or if there are still pieces of him stored in some Russian freezer.

He has to stop reading for ten minutes, pulling his feet onto the chair and hugging his knees, trying to get his flesh hand to stop shaking. When he finally gets himself under control, Nick passes him a steaming mug of tea. The smell of the tea is familiar, reminding James of late night planning sessions, with Peggy brewing a pot of tea and pouring cups for them both. He has two seconds of thinking fondly about working with Peggy before he remembers blood and bone and the shattered thing she'd been turned into. He manages to put the tea down and get to the wastebasket just in time to throw up.

"You don't have to do this," Nick says when his stomach stops heaving.

James wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and shrugs.

"Yeah, I do." He'll do what he can, for both Peggy and Steve.

There's more references to serum as they go through the files. And finally the files from the late fifties start talking about the солдат, the Soldier. There are no details, no pictures, just occasional references to operations the Soldier took part in. Sabotage he committed, kills he made. Nick has spent months learning SHIELD history, and he recognizes many of the incidents attributed to this Soldier: unsolved murders, accidents, bombings.

James hits a file from 1961, and the Soldier gets a new name, one James has heard: Зимний солдат. The Winter Soldier.

"Fuck," he says, anger boiling up inside him. Because the Winter Soldier is the darkest bogeyman of the Cold War, and it's an unforgivable sin that some bastard took Steve's gift and perverted it into that monster.

The Winter Soldier turns up in more in files after that, more sabotage, more bombings, more assassinations. With every reference, James is more and more certain that the Winter Soldier is responsible for Peggy's death, that he's the one that needs to be stopped.

"Do you know who's taking over SHIELD?" James asks, after he's translated a passage that seems to outline the Winter Soldier's assassination of a Czech official in the middle of the Prague Spring. 

"It sounds like Pierce will be temporarily in charge." James can't tell if Nick is happy about that or not. "Why?"

"Because I'd bet that this bastard is responsible for what happened to Peggy. And I want to be the one to take him down."

Nick nods.

"I'll talk to Pierce. I don't think he'll have a problem assigning you to that mission."

"Good."

* * *

James spends the next day tying up the experiments he has running in the lab, writing up what he can finish, handing off the rest to other engineers. Until he finds this Winter Soldier, he's not going to waste time in the lab.

The day after that is Peggy's funeral.

James wakes up, fuelled for this horrible day on righteous anger and the need for revenge. He showers and shaves, puts on his dark suit, the one that only gets pulled out for weddings and funerals, and heads for the church.

The anger only holds until he enters the church, until he's surrounded by Peggy's friends and family, by their SHIELD colleagues, all of them well-meaning, all of them too-damn-much for James to handle. He doesn't even realize he's backed himself into a corner until Howard and Maria come to his rescue. Howard chats to him while Maria takes his arm and leads him to the pew where Tony sits waiting for them. Maria sits him next to Tony, and Tony, bless him, occupies him with questions about SHIELD and the people he works with and why more people don't know about what Aunt Peggy has accomplished. James answers the questions he can, glad for the distraction until everyone takes their seats and the minister begins the service.

It's a magnificent funeral, everything Peggy deserves. There is a testimonial from the Secretary of State, and a speech by Peggy's sister, Evelyn. Howard delivers the eulogy, painting a perfect picture of the tough, smart woman James counted as his one of his best friends. (Evelyn had called two days before to ask James to speak at the funeral. When James had barely been able to speak on the phone, she'd quickly retracted her request.) Howard is a much better choice to perform this last duty for their friend.

Tony keeps him grounded, but James is still a mess by the end of the service. He stays in the church long after everyone else has filed out, clutching the pew in front of him with his metal hand, his breath coming in uneven sobs. His eyes are clenched closed and he's trying to find the will to stand when he feels a small hand take hold of his flesh one. He opens his eyes to find Tony at his side, looking at him with eyes that are concerned and old beyond his years.

"Mom and Dad told me to come and get you," he says. "You're coming with us."

It's a mark of just how bad he feels that James doesn't once consider arguing with Tony. He simply nods, stands, and follows Tony out into the sunlight. Howard and Maria flank him and Tony, leading him to their car. Jarvis drives them to the graveside service, where he stands far away from that terrible gaping pit that they lower Peggy into, Tony clutching his hand. Jarvis stays with them, and though he doesn't say anything, James notes his eyes are glassy with tears as well. 

After that ordeal, Jarvis takes them all back to the Stark mansion. James doesn't bother arguing about going back to his own apartment. Truth be told, he doesn't want to be alone. Not at the moment. Not when Peggy's dead at the hand's of a monster created in the twisted image of Steve.

He stays with Howard and his family for three days. For two days he does nothing but sleep and eat and sit in Howard's garden, trying to banish the worst of his memories. Peggy's broken form merges with Zola's lab in Austria fuses with the files he and Nick found and their hints of what those nameless Russian scientists did with Steve's body.

For two days, Tony haunts him like a dark-eyed shadow. He pulls him down to breakfast in the morning, brings him coffee in the garden, drags him into the mansion for dinner in the evening.  
On the third day, it rains, and James is trapped in the house. He sits on a window seat in the library, watching the rain pour from the sky and remembering times he and the Howlies and Steve had been caught under even worse weather, huddled under trees as they sheltered from a German barrage and waited for their own tanks to open up the line for them.

Tony comes into the library. He stands in front of James and frowns, his eyes full of concern. James searches for something he can say to the boy, to comfort him, but he can't even comfort himself.

Finally, Tony reaches out and takes hold of his metal hand and pulls.

"C'mon," he says to James. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon." And if Tony sometimes seems older than his years, at this moment he is nothing more than a five-year-old boy who needs an adult to do something with him Right. Now.

James is suddenly confronted with the memory of another young boy, skinnier that Tony, with blond hair and blue eyes, dragging him into an alley because the Mullan boys were picking on a younger kid and it wasn't right and would Bucky just _c'mon_.

James stands in shock, and Tony takes advantage of the change in his position and starts pulling him out of the library. Tony leads him downstairs and into Howard's workroom, an only slightly less impressive space than Howard's labs at Stark Industries.

"You said I could help build your next arm," Tony says, his jaw jutted out with a stubborn resolve. "So, you have to teach me what I need to know to do that."

And because it's better than sitting alone with memories and the horrible imaginings of what must have happened to Steve, James does just that. He teaches Tony how to solder, how to use the metal lathe. He teaches him how to test a circuit. (He doesn't go near the welding equipment. Maria would kill him if he let her son near molten metal like that.)

The next morning, Tony plans out and solders together a simple circuit board, and then successfully tests it. James claps him on the back, and Tony beams up at him.

"Am I good enough to help with your arm?"

"You might even be better than your dad."

James smiles down at the boy, and it doesn't feel forced, doesn't feel as if his face will crack the same way his heart has. He's ready to do what has to be done.

 

Twenty four hours later, he's on a plane to southeast Asia, chasing rumours of the Winter Soldier that turn out to be as substantial as rumours of snow in July.

But he's on the hunt now, and he won't stop. Not until he finds the Soldier and pays him in kind for what he did to Peggy and takes back the terrible gift he stole from Steve.

**Author's Note:**

> Next up, Tony's Story.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at [**trappingsofzed.tumblr.com**](http://trappingsofzed.tumblr.com).


End file.
